“Is This Normal?” Why It Can Be Hard to Recognize Unhealthy Relationship Behavior

Author bio: Christine Leyva, Ph.D., is the founder of Brave Mind Therapy and a PSYPACT-certified licensed clinical psychologist with advanced training in clinical, social, and personality psychology. She specializes in evidence-based care for OCD, anxiety, health anxiety, chronic pain, and related concerns, with clinical experience across anxiety treatment, behavioral health, rehabilitation, and veterans’ health settings.

tl;dr: It’s not always easy to recognize unhealthy relationship behavior from inside the relationship. What feels “normal” is shaped by our past experiences, beliefs about ourselves and others, cultural messages, and the explanations we make for a partner’s behavior over time.

When we look at someone else’s relationship, certain behaviors can seem obvious. Persistent criticism, intimidation, threats, explosive arguments, or attempts to control a partner may stand out quickly when we’re observing them from the outside.

Inside a relationship, though, behavior rarely comes without context. You know the person’s history, remember their good qualities, understand the stress they’re under, and have your own emotional history with them. All of that can make it harder to step back and ask, “Is this actually healthy for me?”

This question has interested me for much of my career. In my doctoral research, I studied how people interpret psychologically unhealthy and abusive behaviors in romantic relationships, including why the same behavior might seem more acceptable to one person than to another.

What became especially interesting to me was that people don’t evaluate relationship behavior from a neutral starting point. We bring our experiences, beliefs, expectations, and prior relationship patterns with us.

Familiarity can shape what feels acceptable

Something can feel normal because it’s familiar, not because it’s healthy. If someone grew up around yelling, criticism, unpredictable conflict, or emotionally intense relationships, those patterns may not immediately feel unusual later in life.

The research I reviewed in my dissertation included evidence linking childhood exposure to aggression or unhealthy conflict with later relationship experiences involving aggression. One possible explanation is social learning: we develop expectations about how partners behave, how anger gets expressed, and how conflict gets resolved partly through what we observe over time.

That doesn’t mean childhood determines what someone’s adult relationships will look like. It does mean that early experiences can become part of the internal reference point we use to judge what feels ordinary.

For one person, healthy conflict may mean disagreeing, calming down, and repairing the relationship afterward. For someone else, yelling, withdrawal, insults, or dramatic reconciliation may have been so common that those patterns simply feel like what relationships are.

We don’t just notice behavior. We explain it.

Most of us are very good at creating explanations for the people we care about. We may think, “They’re under a lot of stress,” “They had a difficult childhood,” “They didn’t really mean that,” or “They only act this way when they’re upset.”

Sometimes those explanations are compassionate and accurate. But understanding where a behavior comes from can also make it easier to blur the distinction between explaining a behavior and accepting it.

My dissertation study looked directly at this issue. Participants read fictional relationship scenarios that included unhealthy and, in some cases, psychologically abusive behaviors alongside different explanations for why those behaviors might seem understandable or acceptable. The explanations included things like a partner’s upbringing, the hope that someone could help a partner change, beliefs about one’s own worth, and the perceived value of staying in the relationship. I was interested not just in whether people thought a behavior was “good” or “bad,” but in how the story surrounding the behavior changed the way they interpreted it.

That distinction still matters. We can understand why someone behaves a certain way and still conclude that the behavior isn’t healthy.

Self-perception may affect what we tolerate

Another part of my research examined self-liking, which is one aspect of self-esteem related to a person’s sense of social worth. In a study of more than 1,000 women, lower self-liking was associated with rating unhealthy relationship behaviors as more acceptable and with saying they would hypothetically remain in those relationships longer. Those results don’t mean that low self-esteem causes someone to stay in an unhealthy relationship. The study was correlational, so it couldn’t establish cause and effect, and relationships are far too complex to reduce to a single personality variable.

What the findings did suggest was that two people can look at the same behavior and genuinely interpret it differently. Our beliefs about ourselves can be part of the lens through which we interpret what other people do. That matters because outsiders sometimes ask, “How can they not see that this is unhealthy?” A more useful question may be, “What experiences or beliefs have shaped the way this behavior is being understood?”

Our own behavior can complicate the picture, too

One of the findings from my dissertation that surprised me most involved participants’ own behavior during relationship conflict. Women who reported experiencing higher levels of psychological aggression from their partners tended to see some psychologically aggressive behaviors as more acceptable than women in less aggressive relationships.

But the participants’ own reported aggression toward their partners also mattered. In some analyses, their own psychologically aggressive behavior was a stronger predictor of how they judged certain behaviors than the aggression they reported receiving from a partner.

One possible explanation I explored was cognitive dissonance, the discomfort we can experience when our behavior and our beliefs don’t quite match. If someone strongly believes that yelling at a partner is unacceptable but recognizes that they sometimes yell during conflict, there’s an uncomfortable inconsistency to resolve. One response is to change the behavior. Another is to soften the belief: “Maybe yelling isn’t really that serious,” “Everybody fights like this,” or “That’s just what happens when people get angry.”

That doesn’t mean people are consciously deciding to justify unhealthy behavior. These shifts can happen gradually and subtly, and my dissertation didn’t establish cognitive dissonance as the definitive explanation for these findings. What it does show is how complicated relationship perception can become. The way we understand another person’s behavior may sometimes be connected to the way we understand our own.

Looking at your own behavior isn’t the same as taking the blame

This is an important distinction, especially when we’re talking about unhealthy or abusive relationships. Reflecting on your own behavior doesn’t mean accepting responsibility for another person’s aggression, intimidation, control, or abuse. I was very conscious of this issue in my dissertation. The goal of examining someone’s own role in conflict wasn’t to blame them for what a partner had done, but to ask whether recognizing one’s own choices and responses could create more awareness and agency.

Relationship aggression also isn’t one single phenomenon. The literature I reviewed distinguished between conflict that grows out of poor conflict management and more coercive patterns involving intimidation, domination, or control. Those distinctions matter because not every unhealthy relationship involves equal participation in the conflict. It isn’t accurate to assume that both people have the same amount of power or responsibility simply because both have reacted badly at times.

Jealousy is a good example

Jealousy shows how easily beliefs about relationships can influence our interpretation of behavior. In one of my studies, participants were specifically asked whether a man’s jealousy meant that he loved his partner. It’s a familiar cultural message: “They’re jealous because they care.” But jealousy is an emotion, and it doesn’t automatically tell us anything about the quality of someone’s love.

What matters more is how someone responds to that emotion. Feeling insecure or afraid of losing a relationship is very different from monitoring a partner, restricting their friendships, making threats, or using jealousy to justify control. Again, context can help us understand where a reaction comes from. It doesn’t automatically make every behavior that follows from that reaction healthy.

Awareness doesn’t always lead to immediate change

Another thing my research taught me is that insight and behavior change aren’t the same thing. In my third study, participants completed expressive writing exercises focused either on their own role in conflict, their partner’s role, or a neutral topic.

The results were mixed. Writing about conflict appeared to influence some short-term attitudes about whether leaving an unhealthy relationship was acceptable, but the longer-term findings were inconsistent and, in some analyses, suggested potentially negative effects when participants focused heavily on their partner’s aggression. Those findings should be interpreted carefully. The study was relatively small, several results were only marginally significant, and I described the overall pattern as mixed rather than definitive. Still, there’s an important idea here: recognizing a pattern doesn’t automatically tell us what happens next. People can understand something intellectually and still need time, support, and new skills before their behavior or relationships change.

Why recognition often happens gradually

We sometimes imagine that people suddenly “realize” they’re in an unhealthy relationship. For many people, the process is much slower and more complicated. It may begin with noticing that certain interactions repeatedly leave you anxious, ashamed, confused, or emotionally drained. You may start questioning explanations you once accepted or noticing that patterns you used to consider normal no longer fit with what you want from a relationship.

Over time, the question may shift from “Is this normal?” to “Is this how I want to be treated, and is this how I want to behave in a relationship?” That’s a different kind of question because it doesn’t require you to prove that something is abnormal before you’re allowed to take it seriously.

A better question than “Is this normal?”

“Is this normal?” is an understandable question, but normality isn’t always the most useful standard. Plenty of behaviors are common without being healthy, and plenty of unhealthy patterns can feel familiar. It can be more useful to look at the quality of the relationship itself. Is there room for both people to disagree without intimidation? Can each person take responsibility when they cause harm, and can conflict happen without humiliation, threats, or attempts to control the other person?

Healthy relationships aren’t conflict-free. People get irritated, misunderstand each other, say things they regret, and sometimes handle conflict poorly. The difference is often in what happens around those moments. Is there accountability, repair, respect, and room for both people to have needs and boundaries, or does the same pattern repeat without meaningful change?

Familiar isn’t the same as healthy

One of the questions that originally motivated my research was why two people could see the same relationship behavior and reach very different conclusions about whether it was acceptable. I still think that’s an important question. Our perceptions are shaped by our experiences, and that’s part of being human. Becoming more aware of those influences can help us think more clearly about the behaviors we normalize, the explanations we make, and the relationship patterns we want to continue.

When you’re ready to look at the pattern more closely

If you’ve been questioning whether certain relationship patterns are healthy—or you find yourself second-guessing what you’re experiencing—therapy can offer space to sort through those questions with more clarity. At Brave Mind Therapy, we help clients better understand the thoughts, emotions, and patterns that may be keeping them stuck so they can make more intentional choices about what they want moving forward.

Learn more about working with Brave Mind Therapy or schedule a consultation.

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